A New Metric For Startup Job Postings

Dan Shapiro had a post reviewing Hacker News job postings that triggered us to write about something we had in mind for a while - a new metric to publish in startup job postings - (the metric is not new, we picked it up from Mark Zuckerburg) - 'Users Per Engineer'. Basically, the idea is to just derive the number of users every engineer is responsible for - a number that would indicate 'impact'.

"The No. 1 value here is focus on impact. We’ve always been small in terms of number of employees. We have this stat that we throw out all the time here: There is on the order of 1,000 engineers and now on the order of a billion users, so each engineer is responsible for a million users. " Source

'Users Per Engineer'- that would be a really cool metric, and would attract exactly the kind of people you would want for your startup - the folks who prioritize impact over many other factors.